Jack Posobiec speaks at a campaign rally for Donald Trump in Las Vegas on October 24, 2024.Alex Brandon/AP
Last week, the Washington Post sparked a media kerfuffle when it reported that talk-show-host-turned-defense secretary Peter Hegseth had invited MAGA provocateur Jack Posobiec to “participate” in Hegseth’s first overseas trip and that this was “triggering alarm among US defense officials worried about the military being dragged into partisan warfare.”
This article and pieces in other outlets noted that Posobiec was a 2020 election denier and a promoter of conspiracy theories who had championed Pizzagate—the bonkers idea that Democrats were running a Satanic pedophile ring from the basement of a Washington, DC, eatery. They reminded readers that last year at a conservative conference, he had proclaimed, “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”
As it turned out, Posobiec, a podcaster and a senior editor at Human Events, an ultra-right publication, told Politico that he didn’t tag along with Hegseth. Instead, he accepted an invitation from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to travel with him as media to Ukraine for the secretary’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
All of this raises a troubling question: Why are Trump cabinet officials reaching out to a right-wing activist who has associated with white nationalists and who has pushed dangerous and debunked conspiracy theories (one Pizzagate believer showed up armed at the restaurant and fired an AR-15 rifle inside)? Moreover, last year, Posobiec published a book that praised fascist leaders who used violence to suppress their opponents and that demonized modern-day progressives as “unhumans,” claiming these diabolical people are waging an “Irregular Communist Revolution” to annihilate American civilization.
In Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), Posobiec and his co-author Joshua Lisec, urged a crusade to wipe out these “unhumans.” The book villified them as “people of anti-civilization” who are “ugly liars who hate and kill.” The book was a hyper-othering of political rivals, loaded with rhetoric that could provoke violence. The “unhumans,” Posobiec and Lisec maintained, were behind the Black Lives Matter movement, in charge of academia, and in control of corporations, the media, and even churches. “They just want an excuse to destroy everything,” they wrote. “They want an excuse to destroy you.”
“Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.”
Repeating many assertions of the tinfoil-hat crowd, Posobiec, who was part of MAGA’s fraudulent Stop the Steal movement, and Lisec insisted that the riot at the US Capitol was a “lawfare trap” sprung to “destroy” Donald Trump’s followers and “make them an example to any other Republicans who want to get uppity in the future.” They claimed all was calm on Capitol Hill until guards “fired on the peaceful crowd with nonlethal munitions and flash-bangs.” The “insurrection hoax was used to begin a purge of Trump supporters from the military and from public life,” they wrote. In their eyes, the violent rioters, who injured more than 150 law enforcement officers, were “well-meaning patriots.”
With Unhumans, Posobic and Lisec went beyond the usual Tump-land talking points and hailed the efforts of past fascist dictators, while calling for trampling democracy in order to vanquish their political enemies. To defeat the “unhumans” (liberals, Democrats, and others of that ilk), the pair contended, the right must be vicious and adopt extreme and underhanded measures. “Our study of history,” they wrote, “has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.”
As examples of those who successfully fought against “unhumans,” they cited Francisco Franco, Spain’s fascist tyrant, and Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s fascist despot. These two men each led a murderous and repressive regime that smothered democracy. The Spanish government estimated that 114,000 Spanish civilians disappeared and were presumably killed by Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War and his subsequent 36-year-long dictatorship. Pinochet disappeared and killed thousands during and after the military coup he led in 1973 that overthrew a democratic and socialist government.
In their book, Posobiec and Lisec described Franco, who was backed by Nazi Germany, as “a great man of history.” And they justified the brutality and violence of Pinochet’s regime: “The story of tossing communists out of helicopter hails from Pinochet’s elimination of communism during the mid to late 1970s. Wherever Pinochet was, there was no communism.”
In their subtitle, the authors stated their goal was to “crush” the political opposition—a battle they see as being underway today. For them, Franco and Pinochet are excellent examples of winners in the right’s crusade against the “unhumans” of the left.
In the midst of President Trump’s blitzkrieg against the federal government and his political foes, Trump’s most senior officials are embracing Posobiec. But Hegseth and Bessent are not the first Trumpers to do so. Before the book was published last year and before he became Trump’s running-mate, JD Vance gave a thumbs-up to this McCarthyite paranoia by providing a blurb that the duo used to peddle the book:
In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR [Human Resources], college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.
Vance’s recent speech in Munich, in which he was a cheerleader for the AfD, a far-right extremist party with a strong Nazi taint, echoed the sentiments of Posobiec and Lisec’s work.
Other MAGA luminaries have celebrated the book. Steve Bannon wrote a foreword for it. Donald Trump Jr. proclaimed it “teaches us how…to save the West.” Ret. General Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced first national security adviser, declared Unhumans “exposes their battle plans and offers a fifth-generation warfare system to fight back and win.” And Tucker Carlson said of Posobiec that he “sees the big picture and isn’t afraid to describe it.”
When Bessent, Hegseth, Vance, or other Trumpers cozy up to Posobiec, they are legitimizing and boosting a purveyor of falsehoods, a denigrator of democracy, and an agitator who has extolled murderous fascist dictators as role models for the right’s fight against Democrats, progressives, and the left. Put simply, they are endorsing a fan of right-wing political violence.
